Fred Carrillo’s Reborn Roadster

This relic from roadsterdom's racing era shouldn't exist today. After running Bonneville in '51 and '52—and appearing on the cover of HOT ROD in July '52—this old racer was relegated to a field behind an Indianapolis race shop, where it slowly rusted in peace. That's where the story should have ended.

2/9One of the definitive mid-engine Modifieds of the immediate postwar era, it’s hard to imagine the Carrillo & Betz roadster started out as some old Model T quarters and a bunch of castoff wing-strut tubing.

Monrovia, California's Fred Carrillo originally built the mid-engine Modified Roadster for Bonneville with his brother-in-law Robert Betz in late 1950. You may recognize the name Carrillo. Carrillo Industries—celebrating its 50th anniversary this year—is known as the connecting-rod company, still one of the largest piston-and-connecting-rod manufacturers in the aftermarket and recognized worldwide for advances in piston and H-beam connecting-rod applications. Like many of today's largest aftermarket companies, Carrillo was founded in the earliest days of hot rodding. Fred is one of the few who still remember hot rodding's early days of sun, sweat, and salt.

In 1950, Carrillo was an ex-GI building his second race car since being discharged from the Air Force, with help from both Betz and the military. Living in the Los Angeles area meant plenty of access to cheap aircraft surplus from the war effort. Carrillo utilized the chrome-moly steel wing-strut tubing from a PBY flying boat to form the basis for the chassis. After crafting an inner body structure from steel conduit, '27 T roadster quarter-panels and doorskins were welded to the structure incorporating a "roll-over bar" in case Carrillo needed a place to duck his head should he get upside down. Roll structures were not so common at the time.

Without a stock T frame's dimensions to restrict him, Carrillo kept the body at stock width in back but narrowed it as it progressed forward, helping to eliminate frontal area and cheat the wind. Terminating the body with a flair as it wedged forward, Carrillo used two '47 Buick rear fenders welded together for a nose. Between the rear quarters, surplus Dzus fasteners attach the aluminum sheet forming the turtle deck, with a formed tonneau cover created ahead of that. Topping it off was an engine cover made from Model A headlight buckets cut in half, forming the ends. An aluminum bellypan that wedges as it aims forward is also attached with Dzus fasteners for quick removal. Simple yet elegant, effective and cheap—the very essence of hot rodding.

3/9Studying the July ’52 cover, it’s hard to see any deviation between it and the restored version. Owner Frank Morowski spent years combing swap meets and vintage collectors’ stashes to find some of the rare components necessary for the accurate resto.

Inside, the surplus bonanza continued with a B-17 bomber seat, an aircraft steering yoke, stainless fasteners, and even an aircraft battery, all finding an afterlife as race-car parts. A narrow tube axle was created with early-Ford spindles at the ends, located with an adjustable four-bar setup and more surplus stainless fasteners. The Cragar in-and-out box mates to a narrowed Model A Halibrand quick-change rearend. The 16-inch steel wheels were shod with six-ply Firestone Indy tires.

You could say the T roadster body combined with some type of track nose was the hot rod archetype for the time—dozens appeared on the lakes and Bonneville salt. Virtually half the cars on HOT ROD covers in 1948 were T roadsters with handbuilt noses. What made this one a bit different, though not unprecedented, was the mid-engine location, which Eddie Meyer Jr. pioneered at the lakes in 1940.

A 296ci Mercury flathead was built at Evans Speed Equipment using an Evans three-carb intake mounting Stromberg 97s, Evans high-compression heads, and an Evans dual-point, dual-coil distributor. Carrillo was working for Evans at the time.

4/9The narrowed Halibrand Model A quick-change rearend and the front axle are mounted inline with the springs mounted on suicide perches to achieve the lowest possible chassis layout. With no frame structure behind the spring, the pushbars are welded directly to the axlehousing.

At the '51 Bonneville meet, with Carrillo driving, the primered roadster hit 178.16 mph in the C/Modified Roadster class. That was quite a bump from the previous year's record of 162.76 set by Don Waite's roadster. The "funny" body dimensions led to protests by some racers, but nothing ever stuck. After Bonneville, it received its bright-yellow paint and an Evans sponsorship, and was prominently featured in Evans Speed Equipment displays at numerous shows throughout the year.

Immortalizing the finely engineered roadster was its HOT ROD cover and Hot Rod of the Month feature in the July '52 issue. The article included one of Rex Burnett's detailed cutaway drawings helping to show the craftsmanship beneath the skin.

By Bonneville time in 1952, Carrillo was working on a new streamliner he planned to debut in 1953. He sold his roadster to Indianapolis muffler-shop owner Ralph Potter, who was an avid race-car owner. Potter retained Carrillo to drive it. This time, the roadster topped 180 mph, coming in Second behind Waite, who stormed back with a 189-mph record run. As told by Carrillo and confirmed by Alex Xydias, Carrillo pulled off a one-way pass at 190 mph, but all mid-engine modified roadsters experienced extreme aerodynamic forces when approaching 200 mph; basically, they wanted to fly. This bad behavior forced the SCTA to ban cars configured this way until only recently.

By 1952, everybody knew the flathead's dominance was waning, and the Chrysler Hemi was viewed as the next step to record heaven. In 1953, the body and chassis were cut apart to be lengthened and widened for the larger engine. But the rebirth was never completed, as Potter's speed interests began leaning toward the regional sprint and Midget race-car scene. Today, Ralph Jr. is a legendary Midget owner with numerous national championship wins.

5/9You can see how the bellypan is wedged and contours to the body, and how close it is to the ground. This precluded running the roadster at the dry lakes; the only surface this car has touched is salt.

In 1953, Carrillo got his streamliner to Bonneville, where he was involved in a terrible crash that resulted in the amputation of part of his left leg. After recuperating, he enrolled in college courses, studying mechanical engineering and metallurgy. He worked for Aerojet—a Southern California missile and defense company—but never strayed too far from racing. By the early '60s, he decided there was a market for better connecting rods and pistons, and the rest is history.

6/9A lot to take in! The 59AB block is festooned with Evans components. Prominent are the separate water tanks and the copper-plumbing fuel lines soldered together, flowing into the trio of Stromberg 97s. The symmetry of the layout continues with the fuel tank behind one water tank and the aircraft-surplus battery in the opposite location. Simple items like the period-perfect aircraft hose clamps took years to acquire.

Old race cars often become as useful as a wet box of firecrackers. Carrillo's modified roadster was stripped of useful parts, with the bones relegated to Potter's field. Many a racer and customer remembers the rusting race-car remains out back—even HOT ROD's Tom Medley recalls seeing "some old race car" while visiting Potter's shop over the years, never realizing until years later it was the old Carrillo car he shot back in 1952.

After Potter Sr. died, his son Ralph Jr. took inventory of what had accumulated all those years and decided to thin it. The hacked-up car was bought by Peter McManus of Carmel, Indiana, who kept it inside but did little else for the next few years. Eventually deciding to sell some of his projects in 1978, McManus placed an ad in Hemmings Motor News for an "old Bonneville race car." Answering the ad was Baltimore's Frank Morawski and Richard Venza, good friends who checked it out and then bought it based on what they saw as a good-looking, old Bonneville car they could afford—nothing more or less. Parked with the rest of their projects, it wasn't too long before someone noticed the HOT ROD cover and how similar that car looked to their lump of rust.

Morawski looked up Carrillo in California and called him to find out if it might be his old roadster. "I told him I wasn't calling to sell him anything or waste his time—I just wanted to know what he thought," Morawski says. Carrillo knew immediately it was his old car, and that was the impetus Frank needed.

7/9Completing the dual ignition are these N.O.S. Mallory Master coils. All wiring is the appropriate cloth-covered variety, which is routed through surplus aluminum tubing visible to the right—super-sano circa 1951!

Frank was lucky in some ways. Though the car had been cut apart and rusted away in places, his father Frank Sr. came to the rescue with some good-old-fashioned bodywork to re-create the portions of the T body that didn't survive the endless seasons. And the rare Cragar in-and-out box and Model A quick-change—deemed too fragile to scavenge for newer race-car projects—were thankfully left in the chassis. The same was true of the tires, which are still on the car today and the only set the roadster has ever run. They're so old and hard that they'll hold the car up without air. Unfortunately, just about everything else that could be pried or unbolted was, and had to be re-created once Morawski got the car stitched back together.

With the amount of paint laid onto the steel nose and the fact the tires hung out beyond it, allowing for some protection, it remained relatively unscathed. The bellypan, tonneau, and turtle deck panel were missing or mangled beyond repair. They were expertly re-created by Bob Jinkens in New Jersey and Ron Yeager and Jay Paganelli of Rods by Ron in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

In 1998 the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) celebrated the 50th anniversary of Bonneville by assembling noteworthy past cars and personalities. This gave Morawski a date to have the roadster assembled as a roller. No one was more pleased to see the car back on the salt than Fred Carrillo himself, who was there for the celebration. Another 10 years flew by before the car was finally finished in time to be shown at the '10 Pebble Beach Concours, where a special class was established for lakes and Bonneville racers. Since then, the Carrillo & Betz roadster has been shown at the '10 Jalopyrama, '11 Amelia Island Concours, and, of course, HOT ROD's own HOT ROD Homecoming in March 2013, where it had a crowd around it all weekend.

8/9The late Jim Franklin supplied the N.O.S. seatbelts. The surplus-aircraft steering yoke, curved-glass Stewart-Warner gauges, ’40 Ford E-brake as in-out box handle, and B-17 bomber seat are exactly as originally equipped. With no rollbar, the stout “roll-over bar” at the cowl was a safety measure Carrillo envisioned ducking his head into in the event of a flip.

Inspiring plenty of hot rodders and racers in the day, it survives to not only freeze time forever—a significant milestone in top-speed racing—but to again inspire hot rodders and racers far into the future.

9/9If your car was lucky enough to be HOT ROD’s Hot Rod of the Month, a Rex Burnett cutaway drawing graced the feature, elevating the subject’s status while helping to reveal as many aspects of the construction as possible.